After much complaint about certain stories not showing up in users’ News Feeds, Facebook has introduced a new feature called “story bumping,” which will essentially recycle missed stories if they get enough likes and comments.
If a user doesn’t see a popular post because he didn’t scroll far enough down the News Feed, it will reappear at the top, Information Week reports.
Story bumping was tested with a small group of Facebook users and resulted in a 5% increase in likes, comments and shares on organic stories from friends and an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on organic stories from Pages.
“If you think back to the history of News Feed, there wasn’t a lot of content, and people weren’t nearly as active as they are today,” said Lars Backstrom, engineering manager for News Feed ranking, according to VentureBeat. “You didn’t need to be super sophisticated about how you showed people their feed…The average person today has 1,500 stories they could potentially see.”
“With so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information,” Backstrom continued.
To solve this problem, Facebook product VP Chris Cox said they had to start “looking at [updates] and reproducing them in terms of patterns” so users would see the posts most interesting and relevant to them. “We’re in the service of the person having the most engaging experience every single time they come back,” said Cox.
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